


A Love Story To Make Shakespeare Weep: A Memoir

by lindsey_grissom



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-29
Updated: 2008-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-10 14:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindsey_grissom/pseuds/lindsey_grissom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If you knew them, you would have hoped for an ending different to the one they got, but they, I think, were unsurprised</i>.  Theirs is an unusual tale and someone has to tell it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Love Story To Make Shakespeare Weep: A Memoir

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Judgement Day.

Theirs was never a conventional love story.

There were moments of romance. And there was love, I believe, even if it often went unacknowledged by them both.

But it was never traditional. I had never thought it would be, not even from the start. Then, I wasn't there from the very start, but _my_ start was far from ordinary and they seemed to find this comfortable, almost normal in its unusualness.

So no, it was never conventional. What it actually was, I've gathered from countless hours watching them when they were busy watching each other. Or from snippets they let slip when their individual walls were taking heavy beatings; her kidnapping, for example, and his coma. And their friends; they had a few stories to tell, when asked.

And I did ask, for some time they were all I could ask people about. And I needed to put it all together in my mind, because they did have a story, no matter how strange, and like fitting a jigsaw together over time I was afraid that the picture on the box would fade before I finished.

And even now, there are still gaps, pieces missing that only they could have found. But I could never have asked them and so those spaces have been filled in with my own drawings. It's not as accurate, but by now I think I know them well enough to make educated guesses, and there were others who have helped to ensure I haven't made them more or less than they were.

But the picture isn't a good one. It isn't bad, but if you are expecting scenes of moonlit beaches and cosy fireplaces in the woods you paid no head to my earlier words. So I'll repeat them, just in case.

Theirs was never a conventional love story.

If you ever knew them, you would have hoped for an ending far different to the one they got. But, I think, they would have been unsurprised themselves. There was no happily ever after, but I doubt you would have believed me if I said there had been. Only conventional stories can end that way, after all.

 

***

 

Everybody knows that a good love story begins with a meeting and ends with a wedding. There are trials along the way, but this is the format they all follow.

Theirs didn't. Theirs began and ended with death.

This could have been a gross miscalculation by someone who should have known better but missed that particular lecture in story etiquette, if they hadn't had so many first meetings that always began and ended with death. In the end, the fates gave up on trying to make it right. So their story remained the same, but never normal.

 

***

 

He first met her before she was even born. He wouldn't remember it later; he was at an age where faces tended to blend if only seen once.

There had been a death; a young Petty Officer under his Father's command had realised that no matter how many times he polished his shoes, he could never pretend he wanted to be there. The Officer had been a smart man, well schooled, but he'd preferred poetry over violence, and put his heart before the law. Sadly his was a familiar story and one rarely told with truth, indeed, all that made him remarkable after is that his death began their story.

It resulted in a twelve year old Navy Brat meeting the pregnant wife of one of his Father's peers. The woman gave him milk and cookies and looked at him with a slightly dazed expression and a smile so small he never brought himself to complain that he was too old for such childish pleasures.

She would never lose that expression, not even in death and there would be many others that would not find it in themselves to criticise her. And there would be others still that would say her fortune lay in that sad smile but that what she craved most was never given, until the end.

She'd developed that look over a lifetime of blessings and disappointments, the two so often hand-in-hand that she had come to expect both when one came along. Her own Mother had been a frightful woman, heavy with her hand and with a fiery temper to match her hair. Her Father had been a thin man, wasting away long before his time. He had worn the trousers only in clothing, but he had loved his wife and loved his daughter more. And she had been happy in her way, but her birth had preceded her elder brother's death, and her marriage would precede her Father's by only a day.

She was happy, at times, and sad at others, and it would be a loop on replay right up to the end. Though the repeats would come quicker and the times shorter. But she would be consistent in those two emotions until, in the end, they really became just one and her daughter would be left to pick up the pieces and slowly realise there was more to life than just that.

But I've taken us ahead.

In that first meeting, she absently watched a young man eat her shop bought cookies and didn't give a thought to her own child or what the two would be to each other.

She never considered that he would grow up to be a Marine that abhorred his given name but allowed her daughter to call him by some of it. Nor that her daughter would allow him liberties she would deny all others and let him see parts of herself she rarely let out to play.

Marion Shepard thought of none of these things as she watched the endearing Leroy Gibbs sip his milk like whiskey, while the foetal Jennifer Shepard developed unknown.

And Leroy would not remember her beyond a fleeting sense of deja-vu when he catches a glance of her picture in his Partner's house and a distinct preference for red-heads that he was never able to really explain.

 

***

 

She, of course, did not truly meet him for some time. In fact her first meeting would have been counted as his third because he had seen her before she could remember, and again when she was barely even there.

She too would not remember her first sight of him, but the occasion was written into journals and if either had considered it, they could have found out just how often their lives entwined.

I'm led to believe they were never that curious of each other, not just from the words of their friends, but because I knew them too. People with that many secrets are hesitant to look too closely at another's. And they both had so many secrets, both big and small, and I doubt even I have uncovered them all. They hid their secrets in plain sight, and those are always the hardest ones to find.

Secrets were the only things binding them together, at times. And were nearly always the things to break them apart. His secrets, her secrets, their secrets. They would develop and grow as the years piled on, and only some they would share and lose the burden of.

It would be her secrets, ultimately, that would end their story. But it would be his that would make them unfixable.

 

***

 

When she first saw him, he wasn't much to look at. She was only eighteen and there were already more stars in her eyes than hearts.

She'd lost her Mother long before then, and was losing her Father to the job. She had friends but they were replaceable. They knew no more about her than she had told them in their first day of meeting and what she knew of them was stored deep in her mind, but never any further. She had friends because being alone was unacceptable and without social skills she would never make it very far.

It helped that she was so easy to talk to. So easy to like. Without trying she could gain loyalty from anyone who knew her and build trust with one favour unasked. She was small and pretty and smart enough to know when best to hide her brain.

Of course, by the time she met him, she had bypassed pretty, straight into attractive, and her shape had gone from girly to curves. But she wasn't interested in the things her friends were. Oh, she had a boyfriend, because that was expected and easy to achieve, and if he didn't really know her, that was expected too, because he was the Team Captain and it was their final year; he had more things on his mind than her.

So when she stumbled upon him, quite literally; her books flying from her hands as she tumbled forward, her first thoughts were not for his looks or his uneasy smile, but for the time he was wasting and the notes she would have to re-write.

"Sorry, Miss. Here, let me." Jethro, because he was calling himself that now; it got less laughs than Leroy and his commanding officer preferred not to use surnames, bent down to gather up the scattered books. He fell onto his knees when the red-head shoved at him angrily.

"Don't bother. Just get out of the way." Jenny ignored the man, her eyes scanning the ground, her hands busy collecting her work and putting it back into some semblance of order. She had been raised among the Military and Navy and whilst that upbringing tended towards developing an innate respect of Officers, Jenny had never been one to bow to an authority she did not yet respect. And it took a lot to earn Jenny Shepard's respect; her teachers already knew this, and I too would come to learn it later on. But when you had it, it was something to hold onto with both hands, because she could and would do a lot for the people she respected.

And she would, ultimately, count Jethro among that small privileged few. But not then and not for some time. All he was to her in that moment was a nuisance. Someone that should have been somewhere else, but fate had thrown her way just to keep her from studying. I like to think it was fate, but I don't think she truly believed in it, not by the time I knew her.

Still, he was a nuisance beneath her acknowledgment and when he finally stood up she had already begun to walk away, leaving him to stare in wonderment after the first person not to cower before him, since becoming a Marine.

He never learnt her name, never really learnt anything about her at all during that brief meeting. If he had thought back on it, which he did often, but not in any way that would lead to the kind of epiphany I'm considering, he had learnt more about his future Partner in that sitting room, silently nibbling on a cookie with her Mother, than he did in many of their later meetings, especially this one.

But for a few years she would simply remain as the young woman who pushed him to the ground. I would be surprised he thought on that incident again, but I knew him as I did her, and he was always fascinated by the smallest of things she did. He didn't think of her after his marriage, the hidden first and the second, I know this because he didn't remember her when they met again, and he would have, she didn't change much in those years.

Physically, at least. A lot had happened in both their lives by then and neither was quite the same. If he had remembered her, he would have noticed her eyes. Because they changed in the meantime. They changed, and they didn't ever truly thaw.

***

 

You'll remember that the collision on the Campus grounds was her first meeting of him, but his third. His second barely requires mentioning, and I wouldn't, but it is a part of their story. Like the first and third it involved a death, but was more important to her, than to him, she just never knew.

The third death was his wife, it wasn't there at their meeting, but he didn't forget her until Shannon and Kelly were gone. It might have been a kind of amnesia the Doctors never identified, but his records have been seen by the finest and I know they would not lie to me. Those deaths tore out a part of Leroy Jethro Gibbs that he would spend his life denying the loss of, and trying to regain. It is entirely plausible that he would forget anything he did not have to remember, in making room for his grief.

Or perhaps it was fate. Their story would have been different, I'm sure, if he had remembered her all those many times.

But he didn't, and death circled them like vultures.

But at his second meeting, he was barely older than the first, and death had not touched him as closely as it had her, not yet. If he could only have remembered that meeting; it would have answered so many of the questions he left unasked.

 

***

 

The death of a parent is something no child really recovers from. And when one is born into the Navy, where time is spent with only one parent for large portions of life, that parent's death does more than tear away a support.

Marion Shepard died with her sad smile on her face and a prescription of pills in her system. There was no pain; she fell asleep and never woke up, no matter how many times her daughter called her.

It is fortunate that Jenny was only four years old when it happened. She did not yet have the mentality to understand what she had seen, and her mind would develop over the top of the memory until it almost seemed to belong to someone else.

She would have few memories of her Mother because of that. Coping required that she forget as much as possible, and she did. Her Father helped. He didn't want her to remember, and he preferred to forget himself too. But she would find herself walking into that room over and over again in a thousand different houses all her life.

Jethro saw her from the safety of his Father's shadow as her Mother was taken away. His Mother mentioned how sad it was; Marion's husband would be returning from a two year command tomorrow. Jethro didn't hear her or the mutterings of his Father's men as they wondered what to tell him. He was too busy watching the young girl, dressed only in a white nightgown and gripped tightly to her Nanny's body. He saw only how still the girl stood, how the only movement he could detect were her eyes following the journey of her Mother's body.

He noticed the lack of tears and the frozen expression on her face and wondered what it took to make a child look like that.

Later on, he would remember that girl, when he saw other children made still by the spectre of loss, but he wouldn't recall the details. Only the stillness. He recalled her only once where no children could be seen. When Jenny stood before the body of a friend. He never connected those dots.

He was a great investigator but when it came to her, he rarely saw all there was to see.

 

***

 

They wouldn't meet again after his third, for quite some years. They were different people and he at least, had different aims.

He was consumed by his military life, by his job, and she was aiming for the same, but with purpose.

Her Father was dead by his own hand, though she would never believe that. She had her reasons and from what I know of them, she could never picture the Father she knew following in the footsteps of his wife. There was more to her story there, more than anyone would ever know. The suspicions ran rampant, but nothing was ever concreted. And she would hold onto the belief of murder when challenged, no matter how the doubts ate at her in the night and the quiet of an empty room.

Two people dead around her. She was always going to question her own role.

By their next meeting they had both lost the families they knew, but their differences were beginning to shine through. Because he kept looking to have that life again, to recapture the joy his family had brought him before the pain. But she never desired it. She had seen the failure of a family and realised that only through work and success could she ever be happy.

Neither would find what they were searching for. Not fully. But for a little time, they discovered something close enough in each other.

 

***

 

He had had partners before her. In every sense of the word they would come to incorporate. But never all at once; that was unique to them.

He was not easy to work with, not unless you knew him well. It took a lot of time to know him, and not many lasted the distance. But she had determination and just enough stubbornness to hold firm against him. I think she would have stayed with him even if she never found the key, just to spite him. Just to show that she could and would no matter what everyone else had to say.

He was married again, when they were finally introduced. It was rocky and wouldn't last longer than a few months more, but they couldn't have known that. He was blind to those things too, once.

She remembered him. Not from any time he would, but she had seen him just the year before, in a line of post-serving men, Marines who had moved on to other things but were still doing their duty, just differently. She remembered thinking he looked out of place in the formalities. He stood as straight as the others, but he wasn't really there, or he was, but wished quite desperately to be somewhere else.

They shook hands and she noticed that he fit in here. Almost as though the room had been built for him. Then he sent her out for coffee, and she forgot to care.

They didn't start as partners. That took time. Not as much as you might expect, but with them, everything seemed rushed, as though there would never be enough time if they took a little too long on the preliminaries. Perhaps they knew something the rest of us didn't. By the end, they had fitted in both more and less than other people.

Still, there was never enough time.

The case they had brought her in on went from one murder to two and he would have blamed her for the third, if she hadn't stopped him from becoming the fourth. She defended her actions on paper and by voice. She would not admit to any fault, because she had been following orders. Not his, but at that time, she hadn't truly been his to command.

He changed that, fast. He wanted her working for him, not aside. He taught her everything his Mentor had pushed on him, and she soaked it up. She remembered those lessons, recounted them later at the most inopportune of times. She used them against him when no one else would, and she twisted them when she needed her own way. He could easily have come to regret teaching her. But she had been a good pupil, and no one can regret their star.

She would leave again when she had all she could hope to gain from him. She was wrong, they both were; they had far harder lessons to survive through. But their paths were splitting; she was headed for Europe and he was trying to cling to the last threads of an unravelling marriage.

He didn't forget her this time, and she thought of him when others tried to step into the breach.

 

***

 

There is a line that says the best things in life are free. They would disagree, I know, if they could. They paid dearly for everything they got. They had moments where they were inarguably the best thing in each others lives, but those times came with heavy costs. Costs they would ultimately find too high.

When they reached a point where they thought they couldn't possibly have more to pay, something would appear and the debts would rise above them. Then there would be instances where none of it seemed to matter. They could crackle with electricity and nothing else had a hope of interfering.

They danced like the best of them, always just this side of too close, never taking that last twirl that would bring them back together, lest the lights explode and blind them both.

I saw that dance, spanning more time than it felt like. I cut in once, but it didn't last; each song was promised to the other, and no one got in the way unless they both willed it.

They couldn't have lived like that forever, but they changed so frequently that it was just a matter of time.

 

***

 

Lovers have a way of knowing each other that comes across in little gestures no one notices unless they're looking for it.

I was always looking at them. Everyone did. He was a mystery that scared us all, and she was a riddle that wasn't afraid. And they sparked. Just being close to them could make your nerves come alight and adrenaline pump your system. They gave energy out to those around them, and never seemed to drain themselves unless one wasn't there.

She knew his mind like no one else, and he could work her in ways that still confuse me.

He tried to keep her away from his team, but he couldn't distance himself that far. He was drawn to her, a moth to her flame, and she refused to burn him. He kept coming back and she let him, and then she was a part of the team; not a member, but not really apart from it either. He still went to her when he needed help only she could provide, and she would turn up at the strangest of times, when he was balancing on the verge of truth, and gently shove him over the edge.

It took a long time for anyone to see those things. Too long. I remember that first week. Kate's death and her promotion. Ziva was there, but it was Jenny that became a part of the team for that case.

Her job was to rein him in, but she helped him to run instead.

She had too much presence to ignore, but Gibbs' warning signs had been raised and he would not tolerate anyone approaching her in a way he felt inappropriate.

It took time to realise that he felt a lot of things came close to inappropriate with her, things that he discarded at will, himself, but regarded with anger when others took the same initiative.

Of course, she let him get away with a lot of things no one else could. She trusted him enough that sometimes, she put his beliefs above her own. He rarely let her down.

She told him they could only be on duty, no off. Whatever she was hoping for, I'm certain it wasn't what she got. He was only professional half the time and she let herself slide into their old roles. Not fully, but she was more comfortable with him at her side, than under her. When it came to the job at least.

And he liked having her there. Someone who knew him, who had survived his lessons and made them more. She had hurt him, and that kept them circling in parallel patterns. She had goals still, and he remained an unfitting piece. He was wary with his heart, and she had shut hers away after him. She let it out rarely, but only for him, and her Father's memory.

I was there after that particular first meeting. I saw them watch each other and swore the room faded out of view around them. I became used to that, until it stopped. You don't always notice something until it's gone.

They could have written that book. They just might have learnt the lesson.

 

***

 

There was a lot of history to be made before they would meet with roles reversed and pasts secreted away from prying eyes. He would lose the fight and watch as though through another's eyes as a third woman he was sure he had loved tore him apart in front of a judge.

She would fight for her life in dingy motels and invisible battlefields, fight for her pride in offices that held men who wanted more for her success than she was willing to give.

And they would spend time together. They would come to know each other inside and out, but only the parts on show. Not the complete whole.

They would save each other's lives over and over, and return to each other's side when the light faded from the sky. They would travel the world on each other's shoulders; washing the dirt of work away with the passion they couldn't quite quench.

They worked seamlessly, as though with one mind and it made them acknowledged. It put them in places they would never have wished to be, doing things well, but without thinking too hard in case it became too much.

They would do the tasks nobody else could, and she would confuse the black and white with shades of grey only once. But once is enough and she could never have known the extent of the consequences that would haunt her. That would bring her down before she fell gracelessly.

 

***

 

He tried to make it right, the first time. It wasn't really the first time, but he was a romantic at heart and she deserved better than the attic floor during a stakeout. She hadn't complained, but he wanted more.

They were in the middle of a blackout, so candles would have to wait, but he laid blankets across the floor and the food was a little more extravagant than they usually stretched for. They shouldn't drink, but he knew she had gotten a taste for bourbon and he thought he had something to do with that.

When she arrived she could have cried. No one had tried to make the second time a first, no one would have thought a pitch dark picnic to be perfect, be he had, and it was. She fell for him then. There had been attraction before, a sense of almost belonging. But it was as she felt his fingers circle her wrist with unprecedented care that she gave just a little of her heart away for the first time.

No one knows how it went in that room, that night. The files record it as a typical stakeout, with no occurrences worth noting. Nothing important happened today.

Your imagination will lead you where you dare, but they were passionate people and together they could light a fire with just a look. Whatever they did it would have been intense. It would have been deep. And it would have laid the foundations for all that was to come.

Their connection went further than partnership and sex. Those things fade with time and distance. They had a friendship first and a love built on the little things, not the big.

A love they would leave behind with second glances that continued to sting.

 

***

 

They both believed in having no regrets. In living life for the day and not looking back at what could have been. They held no stock in 'ifs'. It angered them that with each other, their personal philosophies crumpled to dust.

They would take both sides of that argument when it suited them most. Which served only to anger them further. They would call each other on the personal overtaking their work, but they were similar enough to know it was a warning, a nod to say the other was watching. They believed they couldn't stop each other any more than they could stop themselves.

But if they had tried.

She was the only person that could have made him pause. He was the only one she would have followed away.

But life had beaten them down. Had made them harder than they should have been, and softer than they could have liked. They made no excuses for themselves, but the reasons were there, waiting in the wings. They preferred a sound argument with rational conclusions. They would pacify with a well thought out defence when a look at their pasts would have been enough.

But others looking would have meant delving in themselves and for all their work begged to differ, they preferred to let the dead rest undisturbed.

The buried have a way of rising when least expected, and their secrets were no different. Almost with symmetry they would find themselves exposing some of their deepest fragments to more than just the other.

Still, he would consider himself one of the few who knew her, and she would think he saw her as a wife. Later, she was never sure if she was like the one he outlived or the ones he outran. Perhaps she was both, or a category all her own. He would doubt that he knew her at all.

 

***

 

The first time she lost control of her façade; he was on his way to Mexico and never knew.

She didn't collapse or break, but she did bend. On anyone else it would have gone unnoticed. But with him gone, everyone watched her closely, whether they were worried or not. It was the little things at first; spending time with the team and out of her office. The glasses of bourbon Cynthia would clear away before the cleaners started talking. She was never anything but professional, except when she wasn't.

With him gone, she extended her wings to fill the gap. I don't think he ever realised the damage he caused when he left. I don't know whether there could have been another way.

In the end, it doesn't matter; the facts have already played themselves out. He left and none of us realised we'd reached the top of the hill; that the only way was down.

He came back, and it got better, but she withdrew and the wheels were in motion, gravity stronger than the hardest brakes.

They were going down so slowly they didn't notice until it was too late.

She was obsessed and he was easily distracted. Colonel Mann was just enough of a blow to send her out of his reach.

He contemplated sacrificing things for the blonde Jenny would never have asked him for, but may have wanted all the same. He never offered her.

I think she knew, by then, what was to come. Not it all, she wasn't psychic and she never brought on anything she didn't face herself.

But the signs were there, when I knew where to look. And they went unnoticed for too long.

He carried on, vying for a life that would fall to the wayside sooner than the others and with less fanfare and he didn't see how she was changing once again. With every step he took away from her, she stood still and stopped following.

The current changed and suddenly she faded as the room became brighter.

 

***

 

The end started out very close to a beginning. She gave him a chance to change the layout, but he wasn't looking through open eyes and her door closed on the final opportunity. He was on the wrong side.

As with all their beginnings there was a death. As with all their endings, one of them would have to leave. That was expected, the timetable just moved closer.

If he had known, he would have been there. He would have been beside her from the beginning, or rushed to her before the end.

He didn't know, and that was deliberate. She kept it all from him and he had been wearing blinkers.

She thought she was going to be different. Her heritage finished with herself, and she wanted it to end in more than flames of despair. She never saw the truth; that she was the same as her parents. She left him to save him the pain. She was repeating the lessons her family had given her without knowing.

It made her no less heroic. It doesn't lessen the weight of her sacrifice. It has a poetic justice to it only appreciable from a distance of time.

She kept him away to spare him; she gave her life to save him. But she couldn't drop her barriers to love him fully and death and love had always walked side-by-side for her.

 

***

 

He didn't break until after the funeral. He couldn't. From the moment the soil fell to cover her, the band playing a song she had always despised but Abby's music in our ears, because she had remembered Kate's and had asked for the same, he was confronted with how much she had impacted his life.

His team had been pulled apart without her there to lobby for him, and the loss of her mind had left him slow to respond and slower yet to accept.

We were all there when it happened. And I include her in this, because she was more real in that moment than all of us together.

We had all had our time, the bursts of grief that came from guilt and regret, a friendship lost, one never formed, one faded over time but now gone completely. Abby was perhaps the healthiest of us all, because she reacted instantly in her grief, and slowly brought us all down with her, one by one.

I think now, he had been attempting her response to loss, trying to recreate the stillness that had come to her from childhood, endeavouring to keep that saddest part of her alive for just a little longer.

But he wasn't her. His pain always showed through big actions; he hadn't suffered until he was too old for silence.

The bourbon was the first thing to crash against the latest boat. Then the cups and tools. He found her pictures and tried to burn them. Ducky stopped him, a right hook to his jaw the reward, but he clung to the photographs when he walked away and he stroked her face as he stood in the shadows.

There had been a letter she had written. Just two words before she left it unfinished. He seemed to know what she had meant to say though, and I don't think I'll ever know if that made it worse or better for him. I don't want to know, because that would take experience to achieve, and no one wants to plan for that.

His tears fell long before he started crying. As though they were early for the party but refused to wait in the car until the other guests arrived.

He cried rivers for her, she would have hated that. To see him suffer. To be to blame again.

We cried for them, not her, not him, but for the third entity that followed in their wake, the 'them' that we had only glimpsed but knew had to have been magnificent in its glory. It was enthralling in its despair.

I watched her stand beside him, like she was made to be there, with tracks to match his own on her cheeks. And she never looked away from him. Not once.

That's how I remember her. With eyes just for him when he was there, closed and shuttered against the world when he wasn't.

But as he cried I realised his eyes had always been the same. I didn't know how he was going to cope, then, without someone to open them up to.

 

***

 

Romeo and Juliet had a happier ending. Death followed them, but they had each other. Neither had to live long without the other breathing close.

But this was never that kind of story.

A romance would have had her saved just in time. A tragedy would have had him follow her into death.

Reality had her dying before she entered that diner, had him miles away unknowing as she smiled her last. And she did smile, her true smile, the one she saved for him when he spun her across a crowded ballroom and made love to her for the first time again in a midnight room.

Life kept him longer than it could hold her. But it took him, eventually, from the beaches of Mexico beside a sun bleached sea.

Their story ended before the characters were both done.

Perhaps it needs an epilogue. A final chapter that shows them reunited somewhere kinder than the world they knew.

I can only tell the parts I know. The things I read and heard and saw with eyes forever changed.

Only they could tell you what came after. But the dead can only speak injustice. And in the end, they were where they needed to be, every time.

The dead don't require a happy ending; they are far from able to care. And the living like things neatly wrapped with shiny paper and bright bows.

As for me; I prefer the truth.

 

**End.**


End file.
